Search Engine Marketing Spot

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I just want to let everyone know I am now using full RSS feeds and have also included the option to receive the feed via email as well.  I understand in today’s society people want there information as fast as they can get it and do not want to be forced to do anything.  So by using a partial feed, you are giving your subscribers only part of the article and then forcing them to go to your website to read the rest.  I do not rely on this website to generate any income, there are no advertisements or affiliate links as of this post on the site.  I also understand that by using a full feed I run the chance of having less traffic coming to my website because the readers get the full article now.  That is also fine, as long as my visitors are able to read my articles and learn this industry then that is what matters.  So if you already haven’t, I recommend signing up to my RSS feed and be up to date on all the happenings and information at SEMSpot.

I am sure everyone loves advertising, especially when it is free and easy to get. Free advertising that works is hard to find these days. Starting next week I will be doing an On The Spot Monday’s which is where I will be featuring someone from the SEM/SEO community. The feature will include a short biography about the person, where they came from and why they got into the industry. Where do they see search marketing a year and two years from now. What they are currently doing, the services they offer (if any), website address, blog, full contact information and even a picture if you like.

I might come up with a small format that you will have to follow, however for now I will leave it wide open since this is your chance at getting some free advertising here on SEMSpot. Please do not send me a book of information, short paragraphs will do just fine. Being put On The Spot is only for those people in the SEM/SEO business, I do not care how you marketing through search as long as it pertains to our industry. The viagra/gambling/airfare spam will be deleted upon arrival. This is one way in which I will be giving back to the community that has taught me so much over the years. Please send your submissions to sub@semspot.com

I would like to congratulate both Shoemoney and Dillsmack on the successful sale of AuctionAds. It was confirmed on Shoemoney’s site today that Media Whiz had bought them out. It was one hell of an idea from the start in my opinion to have Ebay auction ads displayed since it had never been done before. It originally started out as Shoemoneyads and that system was later transformed into what we see as AuctionAds. Jeremy has a pretty big following on the internet, so it was a sure bet that this project would succeed. The sale price had not been disclosed, but I am sure it was a good amount which was well deserved. I can’t wait to see what future projects the two of them are working on.

There have been good and bad things said about auctionads, but then again how often do you ever hear 100% positive feedback on something?  Between Auctionads going down from time to time and the stats not being fully accurate for some people, they still managed to pull in over 25,000 members in only a 5 or 6 month time frame.  I knew though when I first read that Jeremy was starting AuctionAds it would grow fast because he is such a well known figure in this industry and the blogging world.  To start out, AuctionAds was paying 100% to it’s advertisers, so who in the hell wouldn’t take that deal?  I know on his talk show Jeremy mentioned about not making money off of the site really, however the goal was to get as many members as possible and hope for a buyout.  That was the end result today, so once again congratulations guys on the successful sale.

Yes you read the subject title correctly, however Digg did not just come out and say it. Digg announced this morning on the Digg blog by Kevin Rose that they have signed on with Microsoft as there new partner to sell and serve the ads on digg. It is similar to the deal Facebook signed with Microsoft last year. It goes on to mention this deal will give them a better technology platform to keep up with the growth of Digg. That tells me that Microsoft will be buying Digg here soon, which will bring in a good chunk of change for the user data and traffic.

From the Digg Blog:

Hey everyone – I wanted to give you a heads-up before the official announcement is made later today. We’ve signed on Microsoft as our new partner to sell and serve the ads on Digg. It’s a deal similar to the one Facebook signed with Microsoft last year.

This move gives us an advertising partner with a larger organization and a more scalable technology platform to keep pace with Digg’s growth. Best of all, it lets the Digg team completely focus on new feature development. Federated Media, which has been an awesome partner for the last year and a half, will continue working with Digg focusing on integrated sponsorships and custom programs like the Arc project in labs.

It’s important to say that we’re as focused as ever on a great user experience. So, no dancing monkey ads, and the design will remain uncluttered.

New (big) features coming soon…

Kevin

So how much do you think Microsoft will pay for Digg.com?

Don’t you hate it when you find a list of websites that are suppose to offer free submission, then you find out you have to either pay a small fee or take the time and put a reciprocal link somewhere on your website. I was in search of actual free submission sites that I could just put in my blog site information or even my RSS feed and just hit submit. Well I am starting a list of tested and true to be free blog submission sites. The list is currently only 45 sites, however I will be adding more to this list on a weekly basis as I find and test the sites that are truly free. You can bookmark the list for your convenience and check for updates. If you have free sites that you can submit your blog or RSS link to please let me know as I will gladly add it to the list.

http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/submit_blog.html
http://www.globeofblogs.com/register.php
http://blogstreet.com/bsibin/add.cgi
http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/
http://www.readablog.com/AddFeed.aspx
http://www.blogdigger.com/add.jsp
http://portal.eatonweb.com/register/ (quick sign up first)
http://blo.gs/ping.php
http://www.hirank.com/semantic-indexing-project/census/index.html
http://www.britblog.com/register/index.php
http://www.bloogz.com/man_en/add_your_url.php
http://boingboing.net/suggest.html
http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php
http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html
http://www.blog-search.com/blog-submission.html (quick sign up first)
http://www.blogflux.com/add.php (quick sign up first)
http://blogintro.com/submit/
http://findingblog.com/add_blog.php?cat=
http://www.iblogbusiness.com/add.html (business only)
http://www.blogburst.com/blogger/join.html
http://www.rss-network.com/submitrss.php
http://www.daypop.com/info/submit.htm
http://www.postami.com/rss.finder/submit_feed.php
http://www.2rss.com/index.php
http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html
http://www.feedsfarm.com/a.html
http://www.rssfeeds.com/suggest_wizzard.php
http://www.search4rss.com/?add=default
http://www.feeds4all.com/NewFeed.aspx
http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp
http://www.feed24.com/?c=add
http://feeds2read.net/Suggest-A-Feed
http://www.jordomedia.com/RSS/l_op=Addrss.html (3 steps)
http://www.nfeeds.com/submit.php
http://free-rss.page2go2.com/rss-add.html
http://www.feedooyoo.com/ref.htm
http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx
http://www.rssmicro.com/?m=fs#theForm
http://www.feeddirectory.us/directory/submitrss.php
http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php
http://www.rssmotron.com/feed_submission.php
http://www.feedbase.net/Add.php
http://www.morenews.be/voegbrontoe.php
http://www.daytimenews.com/submit-rss-feed.aspx
http://www.rssbuffet.com/submit.php

With the google updated coming soon, everyone seems to be scrambling to see what they can do to better there website for the SERP’s. Then some realize that they are the supplemental results and are stressing on how to get out of them. Well first if you do not know, google’s supplemental results are actually a second database that google keeps on record. The first database being the normal listings, or non supplemental results (no genius needed there). The supplemental results are for pages that google feels is not as important as other pages. You will notice that with the supplemental results, the google cache is older since they really do not feel the need to come back to your site unless you give them a good reason. Now you will see in come situations supplemental results showing up higher in the SERP’s, this is due to the search term not being very popular. Let’s look a little further and see the common ways of getting your website or some of its pages in the supplemental index is by the following:

Low Trust Factor
You can have thousand’s of links pointing to your website, however if they mainly come from FFA, blog spam networks, reciprocal link farms or using automated software to put your link on forums and blog comments. Even though your site has links all over the place, those links do not carry much weight with google. With these factors, they do not trust your site as well as other sites in your niche.

Page Rank
Yes I know this might start an argument, however PR is important for any SEO campaign. If your website is in a highly competitive niche, then you better get your site out there as far as linking and site notoriety is concerned. Google will actually take your PR into account when deciding to put you in there supplemental index or not. If your site is among thousands, even millions, then why would they list a PR 1 or PR2 site with the PR6 or PR7 sites? Your PR is determined by google and the amount of quality websites that are linking back to your website. The more you have, the higher the trust you have shown google thus pushing your website higher in the SERP’s and out of there supplemental results.

Duplicate Content
If your website has content that is the same on multiple pages, or close enough to being the same through many pages you can get hit with a duplicate content penalty. Duplicate content does not just stop with the actual body text on your site, this also applies to your page titles and your meta descriptions. People do not realize that when you add 50 pages to your website that share the same title or page description, you are actually hurting your SEO campaign.

So What Is The Cure To Google Supplemental Results?

Best answer I can give you is straight from Matt Cutts blog itself.

In general, the best way I know of to move sites from more supplemental to normal is to get high-quality links (don’t bother to get low-quality links just for links’ sake).

Getting high quality backlinks and also deep links will help pull your site out of the supplemental results. If you do not know what deep links are, then let me show you some examples.

Normal Link:
Http://www.yoursite.com

Deep Page Link:
Http://www.yoursite.com/category1
Http://www.yoursite.com/category1/pagename.html

This will show google pages deeper in your site and they will begin to crawl your site from there. This has also been a great way to help get your website out of google’s supplemental results.

Now if you have a lot of pages that share the same page title or the same meta description I advise you to change them all to be unique to one another. Once you have made those changes, then begin on your quality backlinks and deep links. If you keep those titles and descriptions all the same then you are making it that much harder for yourself to get out and can take even longer IF it even works for you. So when creating your pages, make sure each page has there own unique page title and meta description tags please.

Sphinn opened it’s doors on July 12, 2007 to the general public. It is a social networking site geared towards the search engine and internet marketing crowd. Like Digg, Bumpzee, PlugIM you can vote on a story that you like. We can add it to the long list of social media sites that are already out there. Danny Sullivan is behind the creation of Sphinn so I expect this to take off like everything else. His company has simply created a new alternative for search engine marketers to come to besides some of the other powerhouse social sites. There have been a few debates over the site being good or bad, I can care less however since I wasn’t going to judge it until trying it out. Before making any judgments or stating opinions from what you have read, I urge you to take sphinn for a spin! Anyhow, I signed up for an account last week and have some mixed reviews.

Ciaran posted over at SEOmoz that Sphinn is nothing more then a popularity contest. I do agree with him on this one, there will be writers who will get sphunn just because of who they are. I bet there are people who do not even read the post and just sphinn it. People in the search industry like Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Venessa Fox will of course get more “sphinns” then anyone else, but to some extent I expect that. These people have there followers who will stick to them like glue no matter what they write about. Advice I have for everyone else is to just ignore it and write your own posts for the rest of the sphinn community to read. Downside the speed of the site, loading time seems slow for such a new site that doesn’t have as much traffic as it will in the coming months. I sure hope they fix the speed issue, loading is slower then most sites.

The good thing about Sphinn though is it is only for search and online marketing. This makes the website a great source for news from around the industry. You can see what is the “popular” topics of the day and week so you do not miss out on anything. Yes I am sure you can get the same news from a forum you read or other blogs like this one, but sphinn makes it just as easy. It is still in beta phase so bugs will get worked out. So far though the past week has been good and I expect to rub elbows with the rest of the search marketing world and introduce myself. This site just needs to get it’s feet wet with the rest of the industry. Anyhow I wish Danny and Sphinn the best of luck with this new project.

If you haven’t already noticed, I added the sphinn plugin to the blog to see how it goes. You can get the plugin from Michelle MacPhearson’s blog, and it is very easy to install.

 

 

In part 1 of this article series I listed 7 things that you need to ask yourself and make sure you can do. This article is a continuation of the last four items listed. You could add to the list, however I am only listing these seven for now. If you have not read the first part of this article then you may read it here, Is The SEM/SEO Business For You? (Part 1). If you would like to add to the list, then please do so by adding it to your comments.

Knowledge – To succeed in this industry you need to know more then just SEO techniques. You need to know marketing strategies, techniques, analytics/tracking, placements, and concepts. I believe that a lot of people read a book or two, chat on forums and then think they are an expert in the industry and are ready to start a business. When you ask if you should start an SEO company or get into the industry you have already failed. SEM (Search Engine Marketing for those that don’t know) is the industry, SEO is nothing but a piece of the puzzle. It is more then simple on page techniques that you utilize. It’s the off page optimization that can make or break a marketing campaign. I will write about on and off page optimization later this week for those that do not fully understand what the difference is. Keep in mind that in our industry things can change overnight, keeping on top of the newest methods, techniques, trends is a must. However more importantly is testing out your own theories and ideas to not only educate yourself on what works, but to help the industry as well. Education and knowledge should be an on going process for you and your co-workers. The internet doesn’t stop, so why should you stop learning about how to rank better on it?

Experimentation – To succeed in this industry you need to step outside of the box and experiment on your own. You probably have read about techniques that worked in the past, what if you tweaked it, would it work with today’s search engine algorithm’s? What if you took two concepts, adapted them slightly and combined them together? Best one though is to brainstorm and come up with an idea that has never been tried and see if you can get it to work. Marketing and optimization techniques you read about on forums, conferences, and blogs are not the only things that work. There are techniques out there that people use that we do not hear about. Those people experiment with websites to see if there technique or combination of techniques worked for the search engines to achieve better rankings. Most of the time you will not even know about those techniques until either everyone else already knows about it or the search engines ban the technique or change there algorithm to adjust for it. In most cases that is the order in which it happens. Never stop thinking of new ways for search engine marketing and do not be afraid to test them out. With out experimentation, they will just remain theories you have written down or typed up and saved to a word document on your computer.

Patience – To succeed in this business you need to have patience and understand that good results to not happen overnight. You also need to educate your clients that search engine marketing takes time. If you are targeting a high volume keyword, in most cases it will take longer to rank well then for a lower volume keyword. Without patience you will end up making so many changes that you will have no idea what changes were beneficial or detrimental to your search engine marketing campaign.

Time – To succeed in this business you have to apply the above six things together and realize it will take time. If you think that by buying that search engine software that it will do all the work for you then you are wrong. Yes there is software out there that will give you advice on what to change on the page, but how do you know if the software is correct? They might make suggestions that will take your marketing strategy and do a 180. Also loading the URL, keywords, description, etc. and hitting the GO button is not SEO. A successful search engine marketing campaign takes time, time to do and time to see good results. If you are not willing to spend hours a day, and realize that even planning out a marketing campaign for your client can take a week then SEO/SEM is not for you. Planning out a search engine marketing campaign is the most important thing you do. The research involved can take day’s, putting it all together and forming a proposal for your client can take another day. If they do not like the direction of the marketing proposal or want to alter it a little bit then guess what, that is more TIME. You want to succeed then you need realize a lot of us out here have put in the time and continue to do so to this day, are you willing to commit to it?

Write down or print out these things listed above so you do not forget. It is easy to read something and agree with it, however in some cases people forget about it. Even by looking at it once a week, once a month or whenever you will keep yourself focused on the end result and that being a successful search engine marketing company.

More to come in part 3 of this article series.

 

With this article series I hope to educate some of you readers out there on what it really takes to be in this business and succeed at it. I do not claim to be an expert, a guru or anything like that. I am however a internet marketing entrepreunure that would like to share my experiences with you in the SEM/SEO industry for the past five years. You will read that I have been doing this since 1998, however that was not my full time job then. Some would claim to have 9 years experience, however to me the first four years was nothing more then a hobby. That hobby turned into a definite passion and obsession in 2002 when I took my first full time marketing job. These experiences and knowledge is what I want to convey out to anyone looking to get into the business.

I want to be an SEO, what do I need to do?

I have seen that question several times and I cannot believe that some think it is so easy. I do not think many people realize the amount of time that goes into marketing a website on the internet today. They think buying search engine submission software will be good enough to get started. They also think that SEO is the service they need to offer, however in today’s industry we are SEM’s rather then just SEO’s. On page optimization is no longer enough to achieve good results for your clients, the off page marketing strategies play a major role in getting good SERP’s. In the past it was easier because there was less competition, not many search engines, directories were far few and between. With all of this, it meant less work to be done when optimizing a website to market on the internet. I started out simply designing websites out of my college dorm room for small fee’s back in 1998. Optimizing those websites for the search engines was still a challenge back then, it just did not require as much time as it does in today’s internet marketing world.

I see quite a few people asking on forums if they should start an SEM/SEO business because they see how popular it is. Others inquire about it due to the fact they see some companies charging thousands of dollars for there search engine optimization and marketing services. I have even read on a few posts where the author was inquiring about what they can do to optimize there clients website to improve its rankings. The author of course offers SEM/SEO through there website, yet asking on the forums what they can do to optimize a website. So you have started your own SEO company and want us to do the work for you? I do not mind helping people out, new to the industry or old school I will try and answer any question I can. I am just at the point now to where everyone is offering there SEO service with almost no knowledge of what it takes. There are people out there who see the dollar signs of some of the well established companies and think they can open up shop and do the same thing the next week. This industry is an ever changing and evolving business that requires planning, dedication, commitment, knowledge, experimentation, patience, and time among a few others.

Planning – To succeed in this industry you need to walk slowly with this step and measure it from every angle. Do not think of what is at the end of the road and try to race there for the money. You will not get very far, and if you manage to get somewhere it will not be for very long. This is a very important step in your business practice and each time you sign up a new client. With SEM/SEO you need to not only find out what your client needs, but try and become part of there business so you can see what else there marketing campaign might need to help succeed even more. I love it when there are arguments about what is the most important thing about SEO. This is the one that that has never changed and probably never will change. The most important step to any successful SEM/SEO campaign is the planning. Without proper planning, you could be targeting all the wrong keywords for your client. I will go in more depth about keyword planning in a future article.

Dedication – To succeed in most things in life, you need to be dedicated to your goal or goals at hand. You cannot put fourth 50% effort and expect to get 100% results. There are no quick and easy techniques to achieving top rankings for your new clients, unless of course they already had a SEM/SEO campaign in the past where most of the leg work was already done. You want to succeed in this industry, put fourth the work like the rest of us and in due time you will be thank you did so. You do not achieve high levels of success overnight or in just a few months. Stay focused and dedicated and your business success will follow.

Commitment – To succeed in the SEM/SEO business you need to commit to your goals and stick to them. If you go off track, do yourself a favor and get back on that track so you can build that road to success in this business. By committing fully to your business, you will take that drive and apply it to your clients needs. Those needs should turn into goals, not only for them but your business as well. Follow through and deliver on those goals and it will lead to a happy client and a successful marketing campaign. Without committing fully to your own business model, how can you say you will commit fully to any of your clients?

 More to come in part 2 of this article series.

 

 

On recently on Digial Point, a post was made about the search engines being no more then huge online traffic monopolies.  When you sit back and think about it, one could easily say that they do have a monopoly on the overall internet traffic picture.  Yes there are other means of advertising on the internet without using the search engines.  Some of those methods are: 

• Link/Banner ads on other websites
• Directories
• Ebay/Craigs List
• Article writing & article submissions
• Blogging and guest blogging
• Forum Postings
• Email marketing
• Write for other people’s newsletters

 Now I understand that some of these methods do not bring hardly any traffic at all, in all seriousness how many of you look in directories for products or services?  Yea I thought so, you go to a search engine.  That brings to me to my answer really, yes the search engines are an online traffic monopoly.  Just about everyone knows how to search on them, the results are fast and in most cases are what the viewer was looking for.  In today’s day and age people want there answer and they want it now.  The faster they can get it, the happier they are.  That is why a lot of people turn to the search engines when looking for things, they are the champions of generating traffic on the internet.